Bad Nigger Research Articles

Long-Lost Brothers

This article builds on scholarship that already links Native Son’s protagonist Bigger Thomas to real-life gangsta rappers such as Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur. James Baxter Peterson calls Biggie Smalls a “Bigger figure.” In other words, the persona/character created by the popular, deceased rapper was a kind of literary descendant of Bigger Thomas in the sense that he’s an echo of the “bad nigger” character type presented so memorably in Native Son. In his own work, Nick De Genova invokes both gangsta rap and Wright to complicate the definition of nihilism, which he describes as a state of mind resulting from two competing forces: the drive to self-preservation and the drive to self-destruction. His definition of nihilism suggests an intellectual and emotional life for the gangsta and gangsta rapper, arguably a dangerous claim in a contemporary American mainstream culture that has largely sought to deny his humanity. In this article, a close reading of Native Son and Biggie Small’s seminal rap album Ready to Die shows the striking similarities between Bigger Thomas and Biggie Smalls. In their respective texts, both characters experience existential struggles as they negotiate a society that induces a fractured psychology, causing them to fluctuate between the death impulse and the self-preservation impulse. Seen from this perspective, Bigger Thomas and Biggie Smalls exemplify a kind of nihilism that embodies existential struggle instead of mere hopelessness and meaninglessness. This perspective also aims to revitalize discussion of the artistic and intellectual merit of gangsta rap as well as inspire a reconsideration of the humanity of those “gangstas” whom many in society view in only two dimensions.

From the ‘Bad Nigger’ to the ‘Good Nigga’: an unintended legacy of the Black Power movement

The Black Power movement based the authenticity of Blackness on the position of the oppressed class, or what Malcolm X termed the Field Negro. This article examines the pitfalls of locating authenticity solely with the Black poor. The Black Panther Party aimed to attract as its members the lumpenproletariat, who would not back down from the struggle. This embrace of the ‘Bad Nigger’, a feature since enslavement, impacted on the party but also on the legacy of the movement. The strength to resist authority was seen as central but, in the absence of radical politics, the position has been taken over by a nihilistic outlook embodied in the emergence of the identity ‘Nigga’. By examining conscious Hip Hop and Gangsta Rap it is argued that this identity helps to keep the community in check. Due to lumpen authenticity, however, the ‘Good Nigga’ is shielded from the accusation of ‘tomming’ and it is therefore necessary to rework a political definition of authenticity necessary to mobilise a new generation for resistance. This article necessarily uses the controversial N-word in different forms to explicate a political process and the way the term itself has been culturally embraced.

From Jim Crow to Jay-Z: Race, Rap, and the Performance of Masculinity by Miles White (review)

IDENTITIES Jim Crow to Jay-Z: Race, Rap, and the Performance of Masculinity. By Miles White. (African American Music in Global Perspective.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011. [163 p. ISBN 9780252036620 (hardcover), $60; ISBN 9780252078323 (paperback), $22.] Appendix, bibliography, index.In Jim Crow to Jay-Z: Race, Rap, and the Performance of Masculinity, Miles White traces the ways in which racial masquerade has proven central to the development of working-class masculinities from nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy through today's performances of hip-hop. Establishing the contradictory ways that American minstrelsy objectified, fetishized, and commodified representations of in the first chapters, White's body-centered text then examines how hip-hop performance has helped to articulate new models of self and for youth and for white-and notably, for better and for worse (p. 3). Building on the foundational work of Eric Lott's Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Lexington Books, 1992), he examines the profound consequences of minstrelsy on subsequent representations of African-American men, arguing that tropes of the brute reached an apotheosis with hip-hop culture and rap music beginning in the 1980s (p. 4). While the stoic hardness of hip-hop artists after Run-D.M.C. provided appealing images of power and self-reliance to young men, White also stresses how hiphop performance nonetheless retained notions of deviant male subjectivity as its most defining subtext, especially in the racial play of white hip-hop artists (p. 3).The pivotal turn, according to White, is a move from hard to hardcore hip-hop after N.W.A. stories of inner-city violence a commercial success (ostensibly an argument about the shiftfrom nascent gangsta rap to commercial gangsterized rap). Extending the frame of John W. Roberts's From Trickster to Bad Man (from The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom [Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl vania Press, 1989]), the author examines the ways that hip-hop eschewed the trope of the bad man folk hero for the self-interested bad nigger stereotype abhorred by whites and blacks alike. Thus, argues White, N.W.A. reformulated minstrelsy's black brute as rapper, and transformed males from the 'hood into totemic performers of a powerful masculine authenticity and identity at a time in which there appeared to be few real men left (p. 64).In the first three chapters White's book really sings. His reading of racial masquerade and its centrality to the formation of American masculinities is crafted with nuance and rife with searing insights on performances of blackness in popular music. Chapter 1, and Act: American Popular Music and the Absent Black Presence, tracks the ways that technologies from burnt cork and sheet music to grease paint and recording technologies made possible a distancing of music from its socio-cultural origins and opened the floodgates for new racial commodities (p. 9). (Each chapter title riffs on titles of influential books, here on Ralph Ellison's classic collection Shadow and Act [New York: Vintage International, 1953], which contains the relevant essay Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke.) Especially instructive is the author's explanation of how the ideas of a uniquely American popular culture and normative whiteness were constructed together around (mis)representations of blackness and music. By policing the body in public space and covering music on the stage and later on the airwaves, this process simultaneously centered stereotypes of masculinity and denied the agency of masculine power to men. While he does not delve into the specific musical sleights of hand in blackface minstrelsy, his argument accurately stresses the ways that commercially available music was constructed largely without regard to African-American musical performance practice. …

A Note on Faulkner and The Stagolee/Faust Legends

NOTES AND DOCUMENTS JANE ISBELL HAYNES Independent Scholar, Irvine, CA A Note on Faulkner and The Stagolee/Faust Legends TO CREATE V. K. RATLIFF’S VISION/FANTASY IN THE HAMLET ABOUT FLEM Snopes’s victory over the Devil, Faulkner may have drawn on a bad-man-blues-ballad titled “Stagolee,”1 known also as Stackolee, Stackerlee, Stackalee, Stack O’ Lee, Stacker Lee, and Staggerlee (Levine 413). In Ratliff.’s imagination, Flem is in Hell bullying and tormenting the Prince of Darkness to redeem his soul, which the assistant devils cannot find: ‘We done looked everywhere. It wasn’t no big one to begin with nohow, and we was specially careful in handling it. We sealed it up in a asbestos matchbox and put the box in a separate compartment to itself. . . . The matchbox was there and the seal wasn’t broke. But there wasn’t nothing in the matchbox but a little kind of dried-up smear under one edge. . . . ‘Damn it,’ the Prince hollers. ‘Give him one of the extra ones. Aint there souls turning up here everyday . . . even bringing letters from Congressmen, that we never even heard of? Give him one of them.’ ‘We tried that,’ they says. ‘He wont do it. He says he don’t want no more and no less than his legal interest according to what the banking and the civil laws states in black and white is hisn.’ (870) Flem, still chewing tobacco and clutching his straw suitcase, had been brought to the Prince who accused him of offering as security for their contract a soul which he did not possess; when Flem simply agrees that he has no soul or that since the Prince created him, he has “belonged to 1 Bad man Stagolee was one of many Negroes with that name, all named after Stacker Lee, a riverboat Captain and roustabout and son of the great old River Captain Jim Lee, of Memphis, head of the Lee Line of river steamboats on the Mississippi River in the 1870s. There were fourteen steamships in the Lee Line, most of which were named for Captain James Lee Jr.’s ten children; one steamship was named Stacker Lee after the son of Captain Lee Sr., who lived at 680 Adams Street, Memphis, in a Victorian mansion still extant. At various times the Lee family operated thirty-six boats out of Memphis. The family business began just after the Civil War and continued until 1926 (Coppock 11-14). 440 Jane Isbell Haynes the Prince all the time,” the Prince is flummoxed. He leans forward and “feels that ere hot floor under his knees and he can feel his-self grabbing and hauling at his throat to get the words out like he was digging potatoes outen hard ground ” (873). Flem with his legalism has harassed, out-deviled, and outwitted the Prince of Darkness and reigns now on the Throne himself as Stagolee does in many variant versions of this song: When de devil wife see Stack comin’ she got up in a quirl, — “Here come dat bad nigger an’ he’s jus’ from de udder worl’.” All de devil’ little chillun went sc’amblin’ up de wall, Say, “Catch him, pappa, befo’ he kill us all.” Stack he tol’ de devil, “Come on, le’s have a lil fun, You stick me wid yo’ pitchfork an’ I’ll shoot you wid my 41.” Stagolee say, “Now, now, Mister Devil, ef me an’ you gonna have some fun, You play de cornet, Black Betty beat de drum.” Stagolee took de pitchfork an’ he laid it on de shelf — “Stand back, Tom Devil, I’m gonna rule Hell by myself.” (Lomax 99) Faulkner’s likely familiarity with Stagolee, the Blues, W. C. Handy, and Bessie Smith is established in several compelling ways. Thadious M. Davis explains that Faulkner was completely familiar with both Blues and Jazz. Evidence is strong that she is right: W.C. Handy and his band came to Old Miss in the teens and early 1920s to play for college parties and dances (Blotner I:175; Jimmy Faulkner int. October 15, 1989; Brodsky and Hamblin I:29). Faulkner sketched W. C. Handy and his...

"Born in a mighty bad land": the violent man in African American folklore and fiction

Preliminary Table of Contents: Introduction 1. The Classic Badman and the Ballad The Badman Boaster The Faces of Stagolee 2. Postbellum Violence and Its Causes: Displaced Rage in a Preindustrial Culture 3. Between the Wars: The Genteel Novel, Counter Stereotypes, and Initial Probes Religion, Romance, and Race Paul Laurence Dunbar: Southern Innocence, Northern Sin James Weldon Johnson: Murder in Ragtime James D. Corrothers and The Black Cat Club 4. From the Genteel to the Primitive: The Twenties and Thirties The Negro Finds the Rudolph Fisher's Harlem Tour Claude McKay's Home to Harlem Arna Bontemps's Don't-Care Folk Zora Neale Hurston: Country Men and Women 5. The Ghetto Bildungsroman: From the Forties to the Seventies Richard Wright: Bigger Thomas and a New Consciousness James Baldwin: Escaping from Violence Ralph Ellison's Rinehart The Ghetto Setting The Nurturing Ghetto I (Mark Kennedy and Herbert Simmons) The Nurturing Ghetto II: The Autobiographical Vision (Claude Brown) The Struggle for Moral Character (Ronald Fair and George Cain) The Code of the Street: The Bildungsroman World Updated 6. Toasts: Tales of the Bad Nigger The and Its Mysteries Return to Stagolee The Put-Down The Fall 7. Chester Himes: Harlem Absurd A Man of Anger The Harlem Novels The Badmen Coffin Ed and Grave Digger 8. A Toast Novel: Pimps, Hoodlums and Hit Men The Struggle Between the Hip and the Lame The Hip Victorious Anger Over White Racism The Violent Style The Fantasy of Sexual Dominance Instinct, Justice, and the Allure of The Life A Special Kind of Squalor, A Special Kind of Guilt Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines 9. Walter Mosley and the Violent Men of Watts Socrates Fortlow Raymond Mouse Alexander Easy Rawlins 10. Rap: Going Commercial 11. The Badman and the Storyteller: John Edgar Wideman's Homewood Trilogy Brothers and Keepers: A Family Matter Hiding Place: Looking for Manhood Rot and Renewal Sent for You Yesterday: The Skeins of History and the Sacrament of Storytelling 12. Toni Morrison: Ulysses, Badmen, and Archetypes: Abandoning Violence Outlaws Laying the Foundation: The Bluest Eye and Sula Into the Limelight: Song of Solomon and Tar Baby Trilogy: Three Stages of the Badman Loving Appendix: Analysis of Thirty Prototype Ballads

The Political Role of the "Bad Nigger"

A favorite rationale for the status of blacks in America today has been the absence of black leadership. Attacks on the weakness of Afro-American leaders have risen to new peaks with the election of a conservative Republican president and an equally conservative Republican Senate. Yet such attacks were also prominent twenty years ago and subsided only for a brief period in the 1960s. The death of Martin Luther King marked the resumption of the search for black leadership. In part the emphasis on black leadership stems from the work of social scientists who have attributed the lack of black progress to poor leadership. And in part the emphasis on black leadership grows from an Afro-American tradition in which culture heroes have filled a vacuum created by the relative absence of powerful organizations and institutions. Thus, political scientists as diverse as James Q. Wilson and Maulana Karenga have focused on weak black leadership. Of course, the perspective each analyst brings to his or her study, as well as the suggested solutions, are radically different. This study will examine four prominent classics in Negro politics that have defined the parameters of research for many students of social science. We will then broaden the scope of research on black leaders to include the political role of the

Bad Nigger! The National Impact of Jack Johnson

Bad Nigger! The National Impact of Jack Johnson

Al-Tony Gilmore, Bad Nigger: The National Impact of Jack Johnson

Previous article No AccessBook ReviewsAl-Tony Gilmore, Bad Nigger: The National Impact of Jack JohnsonWalter C. Farrell, Jr.Walter C. Farrell, Jr. Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 61, Number 2April 1976 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2717277 Views: 1Total views on this site Journal History This article was published in The Journal of Negro History (1916-2001), which is continued by The Journal of African American History (2002-present). Copyright 1976 The Association for the Study of African American Life and HistoryPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Bad Nigger! The National Impact of Jack Johnson

Journal Article Bad Nigger! The National Impact of Jack Johnson. By Al-Tony Gilmore. (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1975. 162 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $9.95.) Get access Howard N. Rabinowitz Howard N. Rabinowitz University of New Mexico Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 62, Issue 3, December 1975, Pages 732–733, https://doi.org/10.2307/2936288 Published: 01 December 1975

Bad Nigger! The National Impact of Jack Johnson

(1975). Bad Nigger! The National Impact of Jack Johnson. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 3, No. 8, pp. 192-192.

Jack Johnson as Bad Nigger: The Folklore of His Life

(1971). Jack Johnson as Bad Nigger: The Folklore of His Life. The Black Scholar: Vol. 2, Black Literature, pp. 34-46.